Randy Cassingham’s Blog

Even though there have been complaints about advertising before, because they either bashed right-wing or left-wing politicians (and, because of what advertisers want to say, readers call me a "communist propagandist" or a "right-wing pukebag," respectively).

I Was Hoping to Write a different Honorary Unsubscribe this week, but couldn’t because I couldn’t get information. Debbie Crawford, a 25-year veteran paramedic in Denver, died this weekend. The scuttlebutt is that her PTSD got so severe, she committed suicide — she could no longer handle the stress of the job. If that is indeed what happened, and I don’t know for sure because none of the media outlets in Denver has covered her death at all, that’s truly a tragedy.

A Letter from Roland in Kent, England (where my family name comes from), really got spinning through my mind, because it really helps to put everything in perspective. Let me explain — starting with Roland’s letter (the italics are from the original):

It Was a Hell of a Weekend. Our EMS agency has three full-time “Advanced Life Support” medics to run on calls with the ambulance crews, which are usually staffed by “regular” EMTs. That gives us a primary, a secondary (calls often come after long waits of nothing, and then we get two ...or three), and room for the third to have a day off now and then. On Friday, Kit and I ran a call that ended up taking three hours — and we weren’t even involved in the transport part! I can’t say what took so long, but sometimes it happens that way.

OK: Call Me a Contrarian.Sure the lip-synching cop was entertaining! The song is fun, and who can’t like the earnest and drop-dead gorgeous (and cute! — see below) Taylor Swift? But really: we are in a cycle of big distrust of cops in this country, so their solution is to lie about just happening to find this video of the cop in their random review of dashcam footage?

In a discussion group I frequent, one of the members posed a link, and wondered:

“Not sure if the writers here see the need for this....”

The link was to a Kickstarter pitch for the “Hemingwrite — A Distraction Free Digital Typewriter” which “combines the simplicity of a typewriter with all of the modern conveniences of living in 2014: cloud documents, e-paper display, and full-size mechanical keyboard.”

I Am Charlie. Unless you live in a cave, you probably have heard something about a terrorist attack on a weekly magazine in Paris this week. Charlie is Charlie Hebdo. Who’s he? Well, that’s French for Weekly Charlie — and they chose “Charlie” for Charlie Brown, the perpetual underdog in the Peanuts comic strip.

Another Year Gone Already. It sure seems to have gone by in a hurry. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book about the future, he thought people might want to stand out as different by wearing weird clothes and oddly colored hair. Check. He thought the pace of change would accelerate. Check! But what really caught my eye when I read the book way back in the 70s is that time seems to go by faster the older you get. The theory: a year is a long time to a 10-year-old, since a year is a tenth of her life. But a year is a mere 2 percent of a 50-year-old’s life, and that’s just a flash by comparison. That intrigued me as a youngster when I read the book — that different people could perceive the same events in different ways. These days, it seems hard to find two people who perceive the same events in the same way....